


at the wrong end of a very long tunnel

by eurydiced



Series: lunoct week 2020 [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Character Study, F/M, Introspection, Lunafreya Nox Fleuret Lives, Lunoct Week 2020, Noctis Lucis Caelum Lives, Panic Attacks, Trauma, allusions to the main canon ending and ep ignis vers 2, this may be the result of reading too much richard siken in one day, uhhhh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:56:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26654785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eurydiced/pseuds/eurydiced
Summary: He thinks,We’re okay. We’re okay. Everything’s fine. I’m alive, and Luna’s alive with me.He thinks,She should she be a few degrees warmer.*(do i look like a ghost to you?)
Relationships: Lunafreya Nox Fleuret/Noctis Lucis Caelum
Series: lunoct week 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1940125
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17
Collections: Lunoct Week 2020





	at the wrong end of a very long tunnel

**Author's Note:**

> (please scroll to the endnote for specific content warnings! this gets a little heavy)

_you can sleep now, you said. you can sleep now. you said that._  
_i had a dream where you said that. thanks for saying that._  
_you weren’t supposed to._  
**— straw house, straw dog / r. siken**

* * *

He wakes, often, scrabbling at the bed beside him.

Noctis doesn’t remember his dreams anymore, not since his long, cold sleep in the Crystal, and sometimes he wonders if that was another price paid. His future, in exchange for his dreams. Yet more fine print in his contract with the Gods, he supposed: a contract drawn up in blood and closed with the conspiratorial locking of little fingers, one paler than the other, two small smiles swapped over an open copy of the Children’s Cosmology. Terms of agreement in a kid-friendly font. _I won’t let you down._

It’s—a good thing, he supposes. He knows better than to assume his dreams would be happy ones.

But there’s a yawning chasm in his memory when he stirs in the morning. And he never feels any more rested.

He only gets the aftershocks: the stomach-tearing-breath-stopping-chest-punching _lurch_ towards waking and the certainty like a sliver of ice in his heart that, this time, _this time_ , he will cast his arm to the side and meet with—with air, cool and empty, his hand will _thud_ against the mattress and—

—and there’s something there.

Of course there is. There’s always something there.

“My love,” Luna murmurs, and rolls over closer. Twines her fingers with his, rubs his knuckles and kisses his jaw, scratchy with stubble. “Are you alright?”

Of course. Luna always asks him that.

Luna is always there.

Her face is buried in his neck now, Roman nose brushing the pulse point at his neck, and he thinks she’s falling back to sleep when her hand curls, loose around his, on top of his chest.

But then he feels her breath on his collarbone, heavy and too fast, and he thinks her hand is pressing down a little too hard.

* * *

See: Noctis is fine.

He is. He’s _fine_. Because there’s a kingdom to rebuild, and that won’t work if he isn't.

So he dons his black cloak with the gold clasps and combs his hair back and attends the ceremonies, the council meetings, the addresses. He feels like a boy playing dress-up, still; the cloak fits him perfectly, he knows it does, but he still feels swamped in it, like when he was six and found wrapped in his father’s cape in Regis’ closet. He folds his hands under his chin, nods thoughtfully as his advisors speak, and tries very, very hard to stop bouncing his leg beneath the table (he won’t be able to hide it, that habit, when they reconstruct the throne). He also tries very, very hard to remember his political tutoring and court experience from what seems like _eons_ ago, then realises, with a lance of bitterness in his chest: he barely had any.

What kind of king doesn’t raise his son to understand the royal court?

 _The kind who doesn’t expect him to live that long,_ supplies an oily and too-familiar voice in the back of his mind, and that shuts Noctis right up.

Luna’s hand on his other leg anchors him, and—he is grateful, he is _so grateful_ that she is here, and he feels so ill. Because Luna understands everything. Her smile is as polished as glass; she tilts her head at all the correct moments, knows when to frown and when to hum and when to respectfully interrupt. She speaks it like a first language: the politics of clutching at a crumbling nation with your hands and pressing the pieces back together. No one ever spared her the details. No one ever looked at Luna and thought, _This girl will die before she’s thirty, and she’ll have spent most of her life writing sermons and negotiating imperial checkpoints._

It’s fine, he tells himself. It’s _fine_. Luna has something now that she’s never had before: time.

Nausea claws at his stomach anyway.

He skips dinner and cloisters himself at his desk, typing and scrawling and pinching the bridge of his nose because this speech is due _tomorrow_ (ten years and an apocalypse and still he hasn’t changed), and gently declines when Luna offers to help. Even when she presses cool fingertips to the furrow in his brow to smooth it out and teases, “You’re going to crease the royal forehead.” As if he doesn’t already have crows feet and frown lines at thirty-one.

Noctis catches the hand and presses it to his lips, smiling a little against it when she hums like a satisfied cat. “I’m fine, Luna,” he says. “Honest. Go rest up, okay?”

She combs her other hand through his hair. “Not without you,” she says. “I’m sure the speech will be _fine_ , dear Noctis. Come to bed with me.”

“Not quite, trust me. I’ll join you in a minute. Uh, maybe two. Pinky swear.”

Her hand bunches in his hair. It—it tugs. And Noctis catches a whiff of—something—

—metal in the air—sea salt—and _rot_ —

Luna lets go. He blinks up at her, abruptly unsteady, but she’s glancing away at the floor.

“Not without you,” she said, quieter, and she’s not teasing anymore.

He leaves his speech on the desk.

* * *

In the pale morning he wakes, heaving, and casts his arm out.

It judders against a cold mattress.

His heart caves in.

Luna sprints back into the bedroom in an _instant_ with a tea stain on her nightgown and Noctis snatches for her blindly, dragging in great heavy lungfuls of air; his chest is a collapsed tunnel, a lightless chaos of splintered ribs and graveyard dirt. Seismic tremors rock his haunted body as he grips the fabric of her gown with knuckles ashen-white under their scarring and he presses his face desperately into the hollow of Luna’s collarbone, feeling the pulse there, and—

And he sobs, a pathetic little hitch. Luna holds him tight enough to crush and whispers soft things in his ear as he counts her heartbeat.

Gradually, he calms. He waits for his own heartbeat to match Luna’s, waits for them to slow together, and realises that Luna is shaking too. And tired. Her grey eyes are damp and bruised with telltale half-moons. He brushes them with his thumb, still unsteady, and presses kisses to her collar and cool forehead as they anchor each other to the bed.

He thinks, _We’re okay. We’re okay. Everything’s fine. I’m alive, and Luna’s alive with me._

He thinks, _She should be a few degrees warmer._

* * *

See:

He doesn’t know how he’d manage without her, now. He hasn’t since he was eight.

His wedding ring sits where his ancestors’ ring used to be, silver and gold and, Six, _so_ much lighter. Even then, its gravity is a comforting one. It’s nothing like the demanding weight of the Ring of the Lucii; he no longer hears incoherent whispers when he closes his eyes to think. The wedding ring doesn’t try to—to take him away, or smother him. He twists it on his finger when he feels himself drifting, and it tugs him gently back to earth.

He thinks—none of this would be so bearable without her. He has Prompto and Ignis and Gladio and they ground him with their easy camaraderie, but it—it helps, it helps so much, to sink into bed with Luna at the end of the day and hold her as she falls asleep. To see her hair (pale to begin with and paler now with age) spread all over their pillow, tickling his face, and chuckle quietly against her neck when she snores. It helps to ask her advice on matters of state. It helps, too, to ask her opinion on things not because he _needs_ it, but simply to—to hear her talk, uninterrupted, and watch her diplomatic poise melt away into bookwormish enthusiasm.

There’s the smell of her, too. Luna collected perfumes. Floral ones, mostly: bluebell, rose, sylleblossom, daisy, freesia (he’d made a note of her favourites and tucked it into the back of his drawer, for reference). But even without them, she always smells like flowers. It’s best whenever Luna drifts in from her garden with flyaway hair and soil smeared on her face, beaming, tucking a trowel into her gardening overalls. She smells like earth, and she laughs (“ _Noctis_ ,” she admonishes, faux-stern) when Noctis catches her waist and tells her _you stink_ and kisses the dirt stain on her cheekbone, and for a few minutes they are both full of light and air.

It settles something in him. Something agitated and animal. It just…helps.

Sometimes the smell is off, though.

He can’t quite place it. Like the flowers, but sickly. _Wrong._ Like—decaying fruit.

He never says this, not to anyone. Not even to Luna. But it always happens on her sombre days when she sits in their bedroom and gazes at nothing in particular, hand curling—almost protectively—at her stomach, and hesitates before she touches him.

( _He closes his eyes and sees a flashbulb burst of red._ )

He doesn’t know how he’d do all this without her.

But—

But he thinks that—he _does_. Somewhere.

When Noctis gropes the bed beside him for the heat of another body, there’s something underneath the panic. Like resignation, a steady ache under his rib cage, a weariness in his joints that has nothing to do with age.

Like he’s woken up alone before. Like he’ll do it again, and again, and again.

Like he wishes he could stop.

It’s—hard, to think about a world which breathes and spins on without Luna in it. _Luna._ His north star.

But he thinks there’s a world like that. A darker world, which never feels any warmer for the return of the sun.

He thinks there’s a world which turns without _him_ in it, too. That’s—easier to wrap his head around. He tends to think the council meetings would go about the same without him there, anyway.

He can’t pinpoint how he knows this, exactly—he certainly doesn’t dream it. His nights are hungry, inky darknesses now; his thoughts are sticky and black when he wakes up with the sinking sensation that he’s forgotten something. He feels somehow— _less_. Chipped away. He wonders, totally irrationally, if another Noctis is collecting the pieces.

(“Hey Specs,” he says, raising a recruitment poster for the construction effort, “did you approve of this one? It doesn’t look quite right,” and he keeps it raised for another conspicuously silent minute before Prompto coughs and—and Noctis _remembers_ , with a sour thrill of guilt.

But it wasn’t that—that he _forgot_. He just thought—for a moment that, maybe—that Ignis _wasn’t_ anymore.)

But he doesn’t always wake up reaching for Luna. Sometimes, he wakes feeling ice in his stomach and fire in his chest. He scrabbles at the muscle over his jackrabbit heart, frantic enough to score red lines with his nails, and can’t seem to open his throat long enough to breathe; his limbs feel distant and clumsy and bloodless and there’s an echo in his ribs like the bite of steel and heartache. Luna snaps upright, holding his wrists, muttering groggy, soothing nothings as she rubs his hands.

There’s a smell in the air like a dozen blown fuses.

There’s Dad’s face behind his eyelids.

( _The phantom sword knocks the air out of him when it plunges in his chest: a royal arm collected, settling in Noctis’ soul like a scabbard. He smells distant burning. There’s no wound, but he still feels the scarring._

 _He wonders if it will always be like this._ )

He presses a palm to his breastbone, looking for puckered skin. He doesn’t find it.

* * *

(When Luna snaps him awake with a gasping cry of her own, Noctis doesn’t hesitate to press her puffy, red face into the crook of his neck. He rocks her slowly as she shakes and shakes and shakes apart, wishing he had her talent for knowing what to say, and doesn’t ask why she’s pressing one hand to her stomach or convulsing like she’s choking up water. But his pulse stumbles when he realises that she’s tracing something against his sternum: a long, thick slash, a phantom tear, wide enough for a sword.)

* * *

“Will it ever stop feeling like this?”

Luna curls over herself in the drawing room chair, clutching at the black cape Noctis had wrapped around her shoulders against her sudden chill during their less-than-inconspicuous retreat. Never mind that it was the height of summer, sharp and offensively bright. Never mind that Noctis was cold, too. He suppresses a shudder. Chooses not to mention it, knelt down beside her with a hand on her knee.

“This all feels— _borrowed_ , Noctis, don’t you feel it? Don’t you—” She catches his hand, then, gripping it with surprising strength, the way she holds her hands together when she’s praying. “I keep waiting. For the day I awaken and—and you are no longer here next to me. I keep smelling death.”

Any words he’d had shrivel in Noctis’ throat. Luna searches his face.

“I just wish for the sun to feel warm again,” she says.

He understands. He doesn’t—know—how to adequately tell her that, that he understands. But he thinks Luna might know that already. That she’s saying it for the both of them.

She was always better with words.

Noctis swallows, leaning forward to rest his hands on either side of her neck. He presses his forehead to hers and hears her breath hitch, sees her eyes close.

“It will, Luna,” he says. “We have to believe it will.”

And, he thinks, sometimes it already does. Stepping into the sunlight rarely thaws him now, but—

He thinks about Prompto lightly punching his arm, Ignis squeezing his shoulder, Gladio thumping his back. He thinks about Luna, rubbing his hands when he wakes up shaking, and holding her with care when she crushes her arms desperately around him. He thinks about her bent over her sylleblossom patch and the curve of her neck when she presses a flower and the way golden hour catches in her hair and the self-conscious smile when Prompto takes her photo, nothing like the smile she prepares for her public addresses, and her amused patience when he rambles about fishing tackles and dancing in the kitchenette, the way her laughter sparkles when he trips over his own feet, the way their fingers heat up when they knot together.

This, too: the point of contact between his face and hers, like a tiny, burgeoning flame.

He thinks: maybe this is all borrowed. But it’s all precious, too, and it was worth facing daemonic armies for these snatches of warmth.

He doesn’t know how to say that yet. So he leans in to kiss her, slow and languid, and hopes she can read between the lines.

* * *

Months pass. Debris is cleared from the streets of Insomnia; they draw up plans for a new Fenestala Manor; they stand on a cliff in Tenebrae and see sylleblossoms again, emerging in great, stubborn swathes from the once-scorched ground. Luna kneels among the brand new field in awe, and he thinks he’s never seen her so light.

That night, Noctis wraps his arms around Luna. Her steady breathing lulls him to sleep.

That night, Noctis dreams again.

**Author's Note:**

> ever think about how lunafreya and noctis have been haunted by death their whole lives?????? hoo boy (slaps the tops of their heads) these bad boys can fit so much trauma in them
> 
> i originally wrote this based (very) loosely on the prompt for day 3 of lunoct week ("lazy mornings"), but then i realised i wasn't going to be able to make most of the days because of External Life Reasons™ and that i was.......lowkey making myself sick with anxiety trying. so. this is now more of a general contribution to lunoct week 2020 :') i do have a couple more pieces to edit and post though!
> 
> (p.s. if you enjoy this, and have a little to spare, maybe consider buying me a coffee!! links are on my twitter @ rikuapologist 🤙)
> 
>  **title:** straw house, straw dog (richard siken)  
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>  **cw:** panic attacks, references to major canon character death / trauma, mentions of nausea, vague references to what might be considered self harm and suicide ideation?


End file.
